Marketing reporting and performance tracking seems like it would be the foundation for any marketing program.  But as we talked with clients, prospects, and attendees at many conferences this fall, we find that with all of the marketing options today, many people stand there like a deer in the headlights when asked how they are tracking results.

Not tracking marketing performance is like being on the PGA Tour and not keeping score.  You just can’t compete and win without doing it.

Here is a list of six tools for your consideration. Let me preface by saying we define what tools we will use at the beginning of each campaign and these only represent a few that we leverage most often.  Also, not everything is easily tracked in one solution, so we often take reports from various formats and pull up our old-school friend, Microsoft Excel, to build custom dashboards based on the client’s specific data views.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In the age of acronyms, CRM is mentioned quite frequently and depending on your industry there are probably a few market leaders that provide a plug-and-play solution for your sales organization at a low monthly cost.  As far as marketing performance goes, a strong CRM is the most critical tool for your business. All of the other tracking tools should be used to identify the procuring source of you leads, but the prospect profiles should be handled with white gloves. With tightly defined procedures on what and when data goes into your CRM, you can begin to build prospect profiles that allow you to create segmentations by various criteria to get tightly defined, personal marketing messages to you highest ranking prospects. I discuss this in more detail in “Six Tips for Managing Your Prospect Database (CRM)” and I will bring this point back in tool Number Six.

Here is an example of Brightdoor’s prospect profile view, notice it tracks all prospect details including actions made by the sales agents.

Brightdoor's CRM displays all prospect data and agent actions on the same screen.

2. Google Analytics

Most of you probably consider this a no-brainer, but you would be surprised at how many people I talk to that either do not know what Analytics is, or have been told that they have it but have never seen a report and have no idea where to find it. First of all, Google Analytics is free and can be set up at Analytics. When installed, Analytics allows you to track your website traffic, where it is coming from and how the visitors interact with your content.  It can go pretty deep with custom reports for those that need them, but at a glance you can easily track your traffic by direct links, search engines keywords and referring urls.

The stat that many people overlook and we monitor the closest is your Bounce Rate. This shows what percentage of your visitors get to your homepage and leave without entering the site. It’s like someone stepping on your front porch and not coming in the front door. If your bounce rate is over 75% you have major issues, 50% and you still have some room for improvement. Most likely visitors are landing on your site and not immediately finding the relevance they were hoping for and hitting the back button.  If you dial in the content and design of your landing pages you can try to get that rate to 35% or less.

Once you get your Bounce Rate in shape you can also track Conversion Goals to see what percentage of your visitors are responding to your call-to-actions.  You can have 5 Goals per site so Registration Forms, Pricing, Downloads, etc., can all be tracked and monitored for performance.  If a goal is not responding, tweak the verbiage on the call-to-action and see if that helps.  If not, you may have an issue with your overall conversion strategy and need to go back to the drawing board.  If your site’s ROI is based on new leads, make sure you are monitoring your visitor-to-lead conversion.

For instance, if you are a resort real estate community using a contact form to capture leads, you should be getting between 1.5-3% of your visitors to a lead submission at a minimum. You need to establish your own baseline performance metrics and constantly monitor and modify your efforts based on what converts the best. We saw a 400% increase in lead conversion for one Client’s site by simply changing the tab from “Register Now”, which benefits you, to “Request Information”, which benefits the user.

Google Analytics can give you at-a-glance details of your Website performance.

3. Email Marketing Reports
In my opinion, Email Marketing is one of the most under utilized strategies for relationship marketing. When a prospect provides an email address, they are opting-in to your marketing program. Many marketers bundle all of these into one list and hit them all with the same impersonal message.  If you have a strong CRM, you can segment this list by demographics or psychographics and get relevant product messages to your prospects in frequent, personalized messages for a fraction of the cost other tactics.

In addition to the segmentation advantages of email, email marketing provides real-time tracking of various key data points. When eblasts are properly designed you have the ability to test multiple items including subject lines, call-to-actions, visuals and sidebars to increase Open and Click-Trough Rates. Sidebars provide a great opportunity to supplement your primary message and determine additional interests of each prospect. These can all be tracked through “click-through” rates, or the percentage of recipients that open each email based on each clickable link in the email message.

Email Marketing Tracking can provide great insights into the interests of your prospects.

We use email as a testing platform to see what prospects want to hear and refine each new message based on the results of previous campaigns. Each client database is different, but we have found that downloadable pdf files, video thumbnails, and recent blog entries are some of the highest performing links in an email.

Email Marketing lets you test what your clients may be interested in.

With tools like Emma, MailChimp and CampaignMonitor, email marketing can be quickly implemented at an affordable price and your list can be managed for opt-ins from your website and opt-outs from each campaign.

4. Inbound Call Tracking

If you are in a business where the goal is to make the phone ring and you use a lot of traditional print or broadcast media, there are numerous call tracking solutions that allow you to track specific campaigns with dedicated local or toll-free numbers. We have used Who’s Calling for years and it provides great functionality to identify the call by incoming campaign, provide caller ID of the prospect and record the call for quality assurance. If used properly, it can be one of the best sales training tools you will find.

Some of the primary features to Who’s Calling are:
• Unlimited toll-free numbers at no additional charge
• “Call Whisper” when receptionist answers phone that identifies campaign
• “Call Log Screen” to identify unique caller information such as name, number and address
• Web-based for easy assignment and repointing of numbers

Who's Calling allows you to track each incoming call's campaign.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Monitoring

I think most marketers understand the potential of tracking their online and social media efforts but really do not know where to start.  There are an abundance of free tools out there to help monitor site traffic, SERP stats (Search Engine Results Pages), and social media mentions, but few can aggregate that into one view.  We use a proprietary system at Hill Mullikin Marketing Co., but tools like HubSpot can help you get a grasp on it if you prefer to manage it in-house.

Tracking SEO performance monthly allows you to get to the top. And stay there.

With our tools, we can provide weekly reports that show the progress on each keyword phrase you are pursuing in comparison to your competition, inbound links from other relevant sites, and social media mentions on most social media sites including facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr, blogs and forums. With organic search it takes an offensive effort to get top rankings and then a defensive effort to keep them there. So monthly reporting is a requirement.

With the proper tools, you can track your brands social media mentions on a daily basis.

I believe that SEO and Social Media work hand-in-hand and leveraging both only drives more qualified traffic to your site. It also helps you justify an ROI on your SEO efforts and show management that this “social marketing stuff” has merit.

6. Database Scoring
As I mentioned before, your CRM is crucial to successful ROI tracking. If you are marketing to consumers and you are building a good-sized database of potential customers, you can really dive deep into your prospect data and score them in comparison with your existing customer profiles.  This will give you a priority based on demographics, psychographics, and specific spending data and can forecast which prospects are most like existing customers. You will need in excess of 10,000 prospect names and 500 existing customer profiles to get an accurate comparison. This is great way to do an annual purge of your database and keep high integrity to your data. There are various companies that do this depending on what your specific target niche may be. And the insights that you gain will be surprising.

6.5. Ok, here are some additional free bonus tools:

http://www.Websitegrader.com – One of many HubSpot products, it does a great job at analyzing the potential searchability of your site by Google and other search engines.  If you score less than a 75, you better call us quick.

http://www.Hootsuite.com – Lets you manage your status updates and tweets for multiple accounts from a central location and shows click though stats on each link. Works great with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

http://www.keywordranktool.com – If you want a free tool to see how you rank for specific keywords, take a look at this.  It’s a little slow and cumbersome if you have a lot to manage, but it is still free and easy.

http://www.compete.com - Compete offers a free analysis tool to measure traffic on over 1,000,000 US domain names. Just plug your domain in against two competitors and see how your site performs in comparison.

http://www.backlinkwatch.com – Need a quick way to see who is linking back to you? BackLinkWatch shows how many links you have and provides each specific URL for you to review.  It throws a few other stats in there as well.

Hope this helps.  Tracking can be overwhelming and take a lot of time to get set up.  But like anything else, you get back only as much as you put in.  So identify the data that is important to you, define the tools that will help you track it, monitor regularly and modify as needed.  I would love to hear about other tools that you are using that I may have left off my list.

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